while. If you didn’t want a relationship with me, I wasn’t going to push it.”
I don’t reply, because I can’t. My throat is tight and my head is spinning and I can’t quite reconcile her version of the last nine years with mine, even as part of me can. Yes, I told her to leave. Yes, I said it didn’t work. Because she seemed so unenthused to be there, because life was hard enough, and yes, because I was still angry. But I needed her to be my mom, to push through my crap and love me anyway. Isn’t that what moms do?
Or, I wonder bleakly, is it sometimes better for a mother to walk away? Better for her, and maybe even better for the child? I know I can’t blame my mother for every hard or bad thing that happened to me. Maybe it was actually better that things happened the way they did. Who knows how life would have turned out for either of us otherwise?
“I’m sorry I didn’t have the resources to help you more,” she says quietly, a throb in her voice. “The emotional and the financial ones. I really am.”
I nod, accepting, unable to reply, because the emotions are skating far too close to the surface, and on this point I know exactly how she feels.
30
ALLY
It’s Christmas Eve. Outside, snow has started to fall, blanketing the street in softness, as the streetlights begin to blink on, creating warm pools of light. It is a scene worthy of a photograph, a snapshot for my memory.
Even though the house is decorated with evergreen and holly, with candles and red velvet ribbon and a big, jolly wreath on the door, the tree laden with ornaments and presents, a smell of shortbread in the air, I can’t feel festive. My heart is like a stone within me, and I press one hand on the cool glass of the living-room window, as if the shock of it will somehow jolt me out of this leaden feeling.
It’s been eight days since Josh was suspended, kicked off both varsity teams, his name whispered throughout the school and up and down our street, my phone lighting up with texts and voicemails I choose to ignore. Apparently the mother of a girl in his class found drugs in her bedroom; the girl ratted out Josh as a way to exonerate herself, and it worked because no parent wants to believe the worst of their child.
The hardest part of it, perhaps, is the fact that Josh had stopped dealing. He insisted he had, anyway, and he’d told us the girl must have been keeping the drugs for a couple of weeks, at least. He was so angry, so hurt, that I felt a powerless sympathy for him; it’s not as if I could tell the principal it was okay, because my son wasn’t dealing drugs now. We were lucky they decided not to expel him, because of his “stellar academic and athletic record.” Suspension for the rest of the term was light in comparison, even if it didn’t feel that way in the moment.
I did feel I had to tell Monica about his suspension, although Nick insisted I wasn’t required to legally; she wasn’t pleased, of course, but she said that since Dylan was most likely only going to be with us for a few more weeks it was “not a significant enough issue to warrant his removal.”
“There are no drugs in the house,” I told her, hating that I had to say it. “I’ve made absolutely sure of that, and Josh isn’t involved in any of that any longer.”
Monica didn’t reply; whether she didn’t believe me or didn’t care, I wasn’t sure.
It’s been nine days since Emma said she wasn’t returning to Harvard and officially withdrew from the university; she filled out an application for a job at Subway, mostly, I think, just to annoy me. That one heartfelt hug aside, my daughter has continued to ignore or be angry with me. I don’t know which is worse.
It’s been almost as long since the whole idea of who I was as a mother, as a person, imploded on me. I still haven’t found the strength to reconstruct my identity. I don’t know how to begin. For the last eight days I’ve been going through the motions of this busy time of year—writing Christmas cards, wrapping presents, existing in a fog, trying to figure out where any of us go from here even as I